Entertainment

Google App Engine: An Early Look

So the big news of the midnight is that Google has launched their application cloud service. It has hands down the cartooniest looking logo of any Google service I've laid eyes on. It has the promise of being game-changing. Given that Robert was at the Google Campfire event, it could have made Scoble cry. Did it do any of that? I'd say that the force is strong with this venture, but this cloud is no Jedi yet.

I've been taking my time, playing with all the nuances of this system, and while it appears very well planned out, there are some definite weaknesses in this system that will prevent it from completely dominating the cloud computing business, but won't prevent it from very quickly becoming a major player.

Google's How To Video for Programming Cloud Appscaution: if you don't know Python, much of this video will be boring.

What It Is and Isn'tThe platform is different from the Amazon clouds in that Amazon gives you an ala carte choice of what you can put in their cloud - it can be your database, your *nix server, your code, your videos - you decide. The Google App Engine is designed to completely house your service, and to integrate easily with Google services.

You're also particularly limited in your development style, as well. Are you a PHP developer? ASP developer? Just about any kind of developer? You're likely going to be out of luck here. No, this isn't a proprietary Google way of coding things, but it is limited, at present, to Python as the development environment. While this is an easy enough language to learn, I've personally prided myself at avoiding needing to learn that particular language my entire life, and now, it appears, I'm going to need to sit down for a week or two and learn the syntax if I ever want to utilize my Google App Engine account I was lucky enough to get. More on that later.

How Reliable Is It?Being as it's Google, I'd imagine pretty reliable. Can you remember the last time any Google service experienced a widespread outage? I'm sure there was at least one or two such instances, but none spring instantly to mind. Interestingly enough, though, the first app that we tested out here at Mashable was the HuddleChat demo application.

There's little special about the app itself - it's yet another chat application, but it's designed to show the capabilities of the system, and how it's able to survive the inevitable spike in traffic that's to come when everyone wakes up in the morning and starts playing around with this stuff.

Fail.

As you can see from the above screenshot (I had Adam take it for me), as soon as the invites went out, I was locked out from the AppSpot domain for about a half hour, and was unable to participate. I'm guessing it has more to do with the way the app was constructed than the service itself, but given that the URL seemed to indicate it was some sort of Google Account authentication error, it's hard to tell.

Which Leads Me To...... the fact that you need a Google Account to use anything. Who's the big winner here? Google, hands down. Sure, unlike the Amazon cloud, developers don't appear asked to pay anything to host their apps here, but the trade-off is that all your users are going to need a Google Account to use your application.

So what do you get for a trade-off? Let me count the ways:

Log-file level access.Ability to see all source and indexes.Ability to view all collected data (database view).Permissioning of the application.Collaborative development (manage access of others with developer level access).Version Control.

So How Do I Get At This?As of about 1 AM CST, I was still able to get one of the limited edition 10,000 allotted developer accounts to this thing, so there's probably a few left, but you're going to need to act fast to get one for your company. We developers are up late as a rule, and will pounce on the opportunity to develop on something like this, even if we have no idea what to do with it.

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